Cinematic Horizontal Leverage: Visual Narratives and India–China Strategic Competition in the Indo-Pacific.
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Abstract
Cinema is increasingly recognized as an important site for the production of geopolitical meaning. Previous scholarships have focused mainly on popular geopolitics, nationalism, soft power, collective memory, and strategic narratives in film, while relatively little has been written on the ways in which strategic meanings produced in a given geopolitical context can become relevant elsewhere, off-screen. The present article aims to solve this problem by introducing the concept of cinematic horizontal leverage. Cinematic horizontal leverage is defined as the creation of transferrable ideational resources presented in cinematic images of conflict, sovereignty, and national power. With a comparative qualitative textual and visual analysis, the article analyses four films: Haqeeqat (1964), Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), Operation Red Sea (2018), and The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021). The study reveals unique, yet transferable stories of sovereign action, strategic agency, military prowess, geographical expansion, sacrifice, and endurance. It argues that what moves across geopolitical contexts is not the conflict itself but the strategic meaning derived from its cinematic representation. The article adds a new framework for understanding the spatial mobility of geopolitical meaning, by combining widely-used geopolitical concepts with strategic-narrative scholarship and the cross-theatre logic of strategic competition. It argues that cinema has the power to affect the broader ideational context of strategic competition by making geographically localized experiences of conflict meaningful in the context of broader geopolitical and national identity understandings of national power
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